It seems investors' anxiety about the rise in capital expenditure of companies to fuel their artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and strategy has reached China as well. "Investors are not pushing back on AI spending itself, but on the lack of near-term visibility on monetization," Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Catherine Lim said. "The key inflection will be when companies can show that AI is driving measurable revenue uplift, whether through cloud, advertising, or transaction conversion. Alibaba ended December 2025 with 128,197 employees, down from 194,320 from a year earlier, which is a drop of 60,000-plus. It's also the most aggressive in terms of spending: It pledged more than $ 53 billion of AI investment over several years.Alibaba aims to become a full-stack AI company spanning semiconductor manufacturing to computing and AI models.

Source: Economic Times March 22, 2026 12:29 UTC